Dash surges despite the crypto market's turmoil

It’s been a difficult week for cryptocurrencies. While Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash have been stealing all of the limelight, Dash has experienced an incredible surge in the large 24 hours. Early on, the digital currency had a value of $319 each. In less than 12 hours, the price had surged to a staggering $520 before settling at $460 by the end of the day. With a gain of over 60%, Dash stood out as one of the day’s biggest gainers; but why? While Bitcoin’s SegWit2x upgrade was being put on ice, Dash had already begun to activate a similar block upgrade on their own network, bringing block sizes to 2MB. While Bitcoin Cash is still the favourite out of big block digital currencies, it is more than possible that some users have placed some of their funds in Dash. Unlike Bitcoin’s Lightning Network and Ethereum’s planned Raiden Network, Dash tends to use larger blocks as part of their own on-chain solution for the scalability issues currently plaguing the cryptocurrency world. The bigger blocks came as part of a network-wide upgrade to Dash. The biggest changes included a reduction in transaction fees and vulnerability fixes that help pave the way for Dash Evolution. Evolution is expected late next year, and, according to the founders, will make cryptocurrency so simple that anyone could use it to its full potential. Evolution is expected to be a major upgrade and so any changes made now that work towards this goal are sure to be favourable in the eyes of the market. Pump and dump teams have had a huge impact on the cryptocurrency market this year. Big spenders buy up assets before selling once new investors come in to push the value up. It is open for debate whether or not a pump and dump team has caused the sudden surge in Dash’s value, but the surge cannot be denied. Dash is currently sitting at 33 percent up while the majority of the market is either sitting level or in the red.